program selection system

How do you quickly and effectively develop a healthy product backlog which you can use as a basis for iteration and release planning? Your product backlog is the product’s requirements baseline: a list of work to be performed, including the user functionality and quality attributes needed, as well as work needed to implement the product (e.g. change control, building your automated test platform). Teams sometimes struggle with developing backlog items that provide a broad enough view of needs and at the right level of granularity. Other teams struggle to organize their backlog according to business value, feature groups, planned delivery date, etc.

This tutorial teaches you how to use a facilitated workshop to define your product backlog. You will learn requirements models that will help drive out user stories, which form the basis of your backlog. We will use simulations in which the product owner and delivery team will interact. Each group will employ a workshop facilitator role, so you can experience using facilitated techniques, combined with requirements modeling, to build a healthy backlog.

In addition to user stories (ala Mike Cohen), you will learn how to leverage the product vision and a subset of lightweight requirements models to define an effective product backlog (e.g., user roles, context diagram, event-response table, in/out of scope table, high level use cases (i.e., use case brief, maps, and packages), business policies, quality attributes, and user acceptance tests. You will organize the backlog using these requirements models, and then assign high-level estimates and priorities to a subset of them.

This will be an interactive session, weaving lecture, simulation, and discussions together. You will obtain a high-level understanding of how lightweight requirements modeling can surface important issues and promote richer communications among the delivery team and product owners. The objective of this tutorial is to expose you a toolkit of requirements models, allow you to experience a set of collaborative modeling activities, and provide you with a reusable agenda for building you product backlog.

This tutorial is appropriate for product owners, team facilitators and coaches, scrum masters, and any delivery team member. If you are leading a transition to agile or managing multiple agile teams, attending this tutorial will provide you with a perspective of the value of using lightweight requirements across multiple teams to leverage or develop your product roadmap.